“Doesn’t this feel like an episode of ‘Band of Brothers?‘

3SG Ger­ard Tan asked any­one who’d lis­ten, prompt­ing another thread of conversation.

“Which one?”

“‘Bas­togne’, my favourite one, where they’re being bom­barded by artillery end­lessly in the for­est, and there aren’t any offi­cers around, and there are no resupplies […]

On Day 4 of the 5 Day ATEC Exer­cise, we came across the car­casses of some ani­mals, decom­posed enough for us not to fig­ure out what ani­mals they had been. Not that we’d be experts at what kind of ani­mals they’d been, because ‘Aus­tralia only got three kinds of ani­mals — kan­ga­roo, koala and cow’.

Not […]

“Atten­tion, atten­tion… 15% off all kevlar hel­mets at tent #27… Hurry, hurry…”

Out­side the tent I shared with six­teen other sol­diers at Samuel Hill Camp was a loud­speaker that blared out announce­ments about every twenty min­utes, ask­ing this sol­dier and that to report to where at when. Very annoying […]

But reservist train­ing just might.

The aver­age NSman (the offi­cial name for ‘reservist’ since 1992, but sel­dom used out­side Min­def) gets called up for standby duties and train­ing stints until he’s around 32, now that the ‘train­ing cycle’ has been short­ened to 10 years.

I’m 36 and have just com­pleted the worst three weeks’ […]

Small talk over lousy cof­fee and sweet cakes at Samuel Hill Camp, Shoal­wa­ter Bay Training Area.

“Eh, what’s that super­hero called ah?“
“Which one?“
“Neh, that one?“
“Which one?“
“That one lah, can­not see him one?“
“Which one?“
“That one lah! Trans­par­ent Guy!“
[…]

Hero shot: It’s all in the gear

Non-hero shot: Queue­ing in the canteen

“Eh, take pic­ture of me and mms my girl­friend, can?”

“OK, how come your phone cannot?”

“Dunno lah. Take for me can?”

“OK…”

“Wait, wait. Dowan already. Take in can­teen not hero […]

Exer­cise Wal­laby is an annual event in Shoal­wa­ter Bay, Cen­tral Queens­land, that the Sin­ga­pore Armed Forces con­ducts, and my unit (433rd Bat­tal­ion, Sin­ga­pore Armoured Reg­i­ment) had long been slated to par­tic­i­pate in as part of its ATEC (Army Train­ing Eval­u­a­tion Cen­tre) assess­ment of its battle-readiness.

Four times the size of Sin­ga­pore, the train­ing area provides […]